Like I mentioned in my earlier post, Rayyan is able to recognise quite a sizable number of words, especially words in the 'animals' category. When we found this out, I remember telling his then childcare supervisor that he recognises words. The supervisor told me that he might recognise words but he might not know how to associate the words with the objects, for example, he might know the word 'elephant' but might know how to associate the animal when he sees it to the word.
She told us that pictures are not good enough and we should find out if he can match the real animals to the words. So Hubby and I actually brought him to the zoo, armed with the flashcards. When we see an animal, we would point to the animal and showed him three or four words. We would then ask him to pick out the cards. He got all of them right! So, we knew that he was not only able to recognise words, but he also knew what they meant.
We then began to look into other areas, for example, we would sometimes give him the animal sounds and showed him pictures or words and got him to pick out the correct pictures or words associated to the sounds. It is such a pleasure to teach him words because he is such a fast learner! This is definitely one of his strengths :]
